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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Panic Adding to the Problems of the World Today

Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:19 AM

The return of the bird flu...

Avian flu shows signs of a resurgence, while a mutant strain - able to sidestep vaccines - could be spreading in Asia, the United Nations has warned.

The variant appeared in Vietnam and China and its risk to humans cannot be predicted, veterinary officials said.

Remember 2005? Remember what happened? Yes, like then, this is not a good time to drink raw duck blood:

Nguyen Huu Viet must have thought the worst was over when he buried his two-year-old son on Dec. 25. The boy had drowned two days before in a fishpond near their home in northern Vietnam's Thai Binh province, and Viet was undone by the death. At the funeral the family served raw duck blood and porridge-rural comfort food. Although they had heard that the avian influenza that swept Southeast Asia last year had returned, they thought the disease was confined to the south. The day after the funeral, Viet fell sick with flulike symptoms. He was hospitalized on Dec. 31, and tested negative for the H5N1 virus that causes avian flu. Viet deteriorated rapidly and died on Jan. 9. The next day, his younger brother Nguyen Thanh Hung, who had taken care of Viet in the hospital, became ill. When Thanh Hung's blood test came back positive for H5N1, doctors retested Viet's blood and found that he'd also had bird flu. "The whole family was paralyzed," says Thanh Hung, who has recovered from the disease. "Everyone was stunned."